New Features: Group Lessons and Syncing External Calendars

Hey all! Since the beginning of the year, I've been working hard to make sure that I'm creating content that helps teachers to become better small business owners. That means a bunch of blog posts and weekly emails to the newsletter.

Which means that development of CodaCal had been put on the backburner. Boo.

But I'm excited to say that I've added some awesome (I think) new features over the past couple of weeks. Yay!

  • Group lessons
  • Two-way calendar sync, instead of just from CodaCal
  • Improved on-site calendars

Group Lessons

Previously, CodaCal lessons only supported a single student. But, obviously, many teachers leverage group lessons to increase the amount that they are able to make in an hour. 

With this update, you can now add multiple students to a single lesson just by checking their boxes.

Plus, you can manage all student subscriptions for that lessons from a single place.

screenshot of billing tab

Two-way calendar sync

Since we launched, CodaCal has provided ical urls that you and your students could use to sync your CodaCal schedules to your personal calendars at Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, etc.

But, that left a bit to be desired on our side. Looking ahead, I want to build out more extensive booking and scheduling functionality into CodaCal. That means that CodaCal needs to be aware of any blocks in your schedule that aren't available, like your vacations, gigs, or dentist appointments.

So that brings us to External Calendars! You can now sync any external calendar into CodaCal via the url provided by your calendar app. Meaning that you will also be able to see these events in your CodaCal teaching calendar as well!

And you can create as many of these as you'd like. So if you have one calendar for personal events and another for gigs, you can add both of them separately.

Improved On-Site Calendars

With the group lesson and two-way calendar sync updates, I decided that our calendars needed a refresh. So, all calendars on the site (including individual lesson calendars and your overall schedule) have gotten a design overhaul.

As you might have noticed in the screenshot above for external calendars, every calendar and lessons schedule now lets you select a color. This determines the color of its events on calendars across CodaCal.

monthly calendar view

Also, in addition to the monthly view that we had before, there are now options for weekly, daily, and list views of your calendar. This gives you more flexible insights into your schedule.

week view

I think that's it!

I'm very excited to have these new features out for y'all to try. If you haven't started using CodaCal in your studio (or you know anybody who might find it useful), check out the homepage to refresh yourself on all of our features and 14-day free trial.

Hope you're havin a good day. :D